The present invention relates to social tagging, and more specifically, to techniques for automatically generating and propagating tags in web 2.0 social networks and applications.
Managing the increasing volume of information available from various sources has become a challenging task for computer users. The adoption of Web 2.0 social networks and applications, where many users can create content, has increased this challenge. Over time, social tagging has developed as a non-centralized alternative to organizing and giving semantics to content and as a way of sharing organizational structure among all users of various applications. Using tags, users apply keywords to elements in the application, which serve to relate these elements to others sharing the same subject.
Social tagging serves a useful purpose because no single user would be able to manage the number of elements that normally populate a social application. Instead, every user visiting a web page or viewing a document has the chance to apply a tag, thus helping him and other users to search for it. This distributed intelligence is much more efficient than tagging by a single user. Examples of applications with social tagging include del.icio.us (social bookmarking); blogger.com (blogs), and virtually any current web 2.0, socially-oriented application.
The benefits of social tagging depend on the existence of a large enough user population that is inclined to perform the tagging effort, and also depend on there being enough tags to converge on a meaningful and stable set of tags. It has been estimated that it takes about 100 tags to reach a meaningful and stable set of tags.
Helping users manage the information available in email is also a growing challenge. For each message, a user must decide how to best categorize, mark, label, or remove important messages from the rest of the message to best facilitate later retrieval. Managing information in email currently primarily relies on manually filing messages into folders. Tagging has a benefit over folders in that a user can apply multiple tags to a single message without the message moving out of view, as is common in folders. Systems like Taglocity provide social tagging of email messages. When a user applies and shares the tag applied to a message, the recipient of the e-mail automatically gets the benefit of the tag applied by the former user into the message that was just received.